El voseo in los medios de comunicacion, el cine y la literatura de Guatemala

Abstract

The voseo, that is, the use of the pronoun vos and its corresponding verb forms for the second person singular in Spanish, has been the subject of a large number of studies. Its use varies according to the region or country studied. In Guatemala, there appears to exist a special situation where the decision of which pronoun to use (usted, tú or vos) depends, in part, on the gender of the speaker and the interlocutor. In spite of this interesting situation, the voseo in Guatemala has not received sufficient attention. In fact, only two previous studies on the current situation of the voseo in Guatemala exist. These two studies are based on surveys with small numbers of participants. These surveys do not necessarily reveal the everyday uses of address forms and furthermore, the numbers of participants are too small to be able to generalize the results of these studies. Therefore, in the present study, I analyze the uses of the voseo in communication media (written and oral) cinema and literature in Guatemala with the objective of establishing the contexts in which the voseo appears and how it is represented, and with a focus on the factors of gender and linguistic register, and the two scales closeness/distance and hierarchy/equality. The four main conclusions of the present study are: (1) There exists a diglossia in which the voseo is part of the system of address in everyday speech but not in the formal register. For this reason, the voseo appears most in contexts which represent everyday interactions. (2) The voseo has masculine connotations. (3) The voseo is used in various types of relationships determined by the factors of closeness/distance and hierarchy/equality, but in all of the contexts in which it appears, it serves to reduce the social distance between the interlocutors.